In the second round of Poland's parliamentary elections, Solidarity candidates won nearly every contested seat, a stunning repudiation of four decades of communist governance. The result, negotiated through the Round Table Talks earlier that year, opened the door to the peaceful collapse of communism across Eastern Europe.
Just a decade earlier, Solidarity's leader Lech Wałęsa had been an unemployed electrician fired for his union activities at the Gdańsk Shipyard. By 1989, exhausted by economic collapse and years of unrest, Poland's communist government agreed to Round Table negotiations that permitted partially free elections—a gamble they believed they could control.
The gamble failed spectacularly. Solidarity candidates captured 99 of 100 seats in the newly created Senate and all the seats they were permitted to contest in the lower house, the Sejm. Communist candidates were so thoroughly rejected that many failed to secure even the minimum votes required under an obscure electoral rule.
The shockwaves reached Moscow, where Gorbachev's government chose not to intervene, a decision that emboldened reform movements across the Eastern Bloc. Within months, the Berlin Wall fell, and by year's end nearly every communist government in Eastern Europe had crumbled, tracing its origins in part to ballots cast in Polish polling stations that June.
Key people: Lech Wałęsa